Systems for creating printable products are generally comprised of five basic components, namely, (1) a “composition engine” component for composing the printable product, (2) a “menu” component for facilitating operation of the system, (3) an “assets” component which provide the visual and formatting content (e.g., graphic elements, text elements, text and graphics formatting data) for the printable product, (4) an “assembly” component for assembling a printable product file suitable for printing, and (5) a “printing” component for printing the printable product.
Current products for creating printable products are sold as software packages installed by a user on their personal computer. Examples of such products include American Greetings® CreataCard® and Mindscape® Printshop®. In these products, the composition engine, menu, asset, assembly and printing components initially reside one or more computer disks (e.g., floppy disk, CD-ROM, DVD). All or portions of these components are loaded into the hard drive of a personal computer for execution by the CPU.
The foregoing approach to creation of printable products has several drawbacks. In order to provide a user with a very large selection of assets for a variety of different printable products, a plurality of disks are needed. Thus, a user must shuffle several disks in and out of the personal computer disk/CD ROM drive in order to review and select the desired assets for a printable product. Alternatively, a user can load the assets to their hard drive which consumes significant storage resources of the user's personal computer.
Another drawback is that the selection of assets remain static, and thus get “stale” over time. Many users desire new assets for the printable products. Thus, a user must periodically acquire new disks with new assets in order create printable products with “fresh” assets. Similarly, the engine component may be frequently upgraded with enhanced features (e.g., new types of printable products), and thus the user must acquire new disks with the upgraded engine component in order to utilize the enhanced features.
While it is possible to download new assets and engines over a computer network such as the Internet, the downloading process can be very slow, and significant hard disk resources of the user's personal computer are consumed in order to store the downloaded data.
The present invention addresses these and other drawbacks of the prior art by providing an on-line system for creation of printable products.